


Embodying Masculinity

by mitchello



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Body Image, Body Language, Canon-Typical Violence, Dick Grayson is a girl, Feminist Jason Todd, Gen, Growing Up, Mentioned sex work, The Male Body, Violence against women, being an adult, hegemonic masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28169769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitchello/pseuds/mitchello
Summary: Jason spends his youth small, not particularly intimidating, and unworried about his body language. It takes him a while after he comes back from the dead to realize he doesn't exactly look the same.Jason Todd, who loves and respects women, experiences his gender through American culture and discovers what that means for him as he grows up.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 7
Kudos: 182





	Embodying Masculinity

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by an article I read while writing a research paper on gender differences in sex work which discussed male dominance being conveyed through cultural expectations of masculinity, particularly physical strength. I was like, "Hmm. I wonder how our feminist boy Jason would feel about realizing he exhibits characteristics of hegemonic masculinity."  
> So this is kind of his adventure through that.  
> Honestly as I wrote, it was more inspired by John Mulaney's Subway Chase.

When Jason is thirteen, he’s 4’10” and skin and bones. He’s made of sharp elbows and clavicles practically popping out of his shoulders. He’s thin and light but he doesn’t really mind it. He throws punches, bites hands, and argues with cops. He slips out of gangsters’ reaches and under the arms of men on the street. He gets caught picking a pocket, but the burly man can’t follow him into the slip of an alley between Dot’s Bakery and Juno’s Hair Salon. Not being as big as everyone else has its advantages.

The working girls think he’s adorable. They pinch his cheeks and tell him when he gets older any lady will be lucky to catch him. Lola, the tall brunette who likes to stroll East Orange and Penn, insists on splitting her bagels with him. She ruffles his hair and tucks him into her side. She’s nicotine, ginger, and Gotham tar. She’s a fraction less overbearing than the other girls, not asking about the cuts that appear on his knuckles, and she’s probably the most badass lady Jason has ever met. She’s broken dude’s wrists, stolen cars, gone to Blackgate. Jason startles the first time he sees her afraid. They’re somewhere on Hewes St. with bagels in hand. It’s late, maybe two o’clock in the morning. A man exits a car on the far side of the street and he walks across towards them. He’s dressed unimpressively and Jason doesn’t find him very intimidating. Lola, on the other hand, pushes him so he’s walking directly in front of her. The man calls after them, Lola gives Jason a firm shove, then she stops and turns to the man. “Hey there, Mister.”

There is a sound of heavy steps on asphalt and the typical type of conversation as Jason hurries to the end of the block. He ducks around the corner only to stop at a loud exclamation from the man.

“You goddamn worthless whore!”

Jason peers around the edge of the building. The man is crowding around Lola, arms gesticulating wildly. She has her back pressed up against the red brick of a long-closed bodega. The last part of her bagel is on the ground. Lola is tall but the man is giant. He stands over a head higher than her and everything about him is thick: his arms, his legs, his fingers. For just a second, Lola shrinks into herself, shoulders drawing forward, head tilting down, and Jason looks around frantically for help. The man grabs Lola’s arm, seemingly knocking the fear our of her because she straightens back to her full height. She pushes against the man. It does absolutely nothing. The man laughs. Jason thinks if Batman were real, he would’ve shown up by now. Lola leans forward and the man freezes. There’s a glint of metal from right underneath the man’s ribs. She has her switch pulled on him. The man lets go of her arm lightening quick.

“Christ, I’m only messing around. Fucking bitch,” the man spits as he steps back.

Lola takes the opportunity and slips away. Her strides are long and somehow poised. She turns the corner and pulls Jason with her. They don’t stop until they’re two blocks down and three blocks up. It’s only when they’re sitting on the steps of a rundown apartment building and Jason takes the last bite of his bagel that he realizes Lola’s hands are shaking.

When Jason is fourteen and Robin, he finally grows over five feet tall. He’s made of angles and muscles and he barely crosses the line from skeletal to healthy. His feet have grown faster than the rest of him, so much so that sometimes he feels like he’s walking in clown shoes. One-time Bruce sees him staring at them in his reflection and tells him he’ll grow into them like a Rottweiler does its paws. Jason doesn’t really believe him.

It takes Jason some time to trust Bruce, but once he does, he finds the man kinda comforting. He likes how Bruce will crouch down so they’re eyelevel with each other whenever they’re having a serious conversation. He likes that Bruce will always have his back because Bruce is a six-foot something hulk of a man and he’s _Batman_. He likes that Bruce can keep him safe.

He’s a little awestruck by Nightwing. Dick Grayson is 5’8” and sinew and power. She flips through the night like she’s made out of the sky and moonbeams seem to bend at her will when she needs a spotlight for her dramatics. It’s her back that Jason gets stuck on. Any night patrolling with Dick ends at the top of a Gotham skyscraper. She tells him to get home safe and turns to stand on the building’s edge. Her back faces Jason and, even in her suit, he can make out individual muscles: deltoid, trapezius, infraspinatus. Then, she leaps. She disappears into the sky. The moment, however, of Dick standing, arms spread, before she jumps stays fixed in Jason’s mind. The width of her shoulders, her ponytail in the wind, the strength in her body all combine into an image that Jason can’t help but feel intimidated by. Sometimes, just before the freefall, Jason feels like Dick is just as large as Bruce.

Jason has heard Dick and Bruce argue. He’s seen it. This time, he gets halfway down the steps to the Batcave when the yelling breaks out.

He freezes.

Dick is sitting in the chair at the Batcomputer. Bruce is stalking towards her in angry steps, still wearing the Batsuit. Jason’s brain is shorting out and he can’t quite put together what they’re mad about this time. As Bruce gets close enough to Dick that he’s looking down on her, Jason starts to get an uneasy feeling.

Bruce’s shoulders are squared and his legs planted in the ground. He’s too close for Dick to be able to stand out of the chair. Dick has her legs crossed, her back straight, and her head tilted to look into the cowl’s lenses. Her expression is somehow calm even though her words are cutting through the space just as loudly as Bruce’s.

There isn’t any flinching or raised arms, but it feels _wrong_. Jason doesn’t know _why_ it feels wrong. He must make a sound because Bruce cuts off and Dick takes the moment to flip over the chair and snag her keys from the Batcomputer’s console. She retreats down the steps and Bruce takes a step away from the chair. His shoulders sag. There’s a roar from Dick’s motorcycle and Bruce raises a hand to his temple, only then realizing he’s still wearing the cowl. He pulls it down and Jason can see drawn together eyebrows and wrinkles that signal regret. He walks over to the steps. Jason finally unfreezes.

“I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know you two were…”

Bruce stops four steps down from Jason and lowers himself onto one knee on the third step so he’s only just shorter than Jason. “I’m sorry if we scared you, Jay.”

“You can’t scare me, old man.”

When Jason turns fifteen, he’s 5’6” and his features look pronounced in a masculine way rather than in a malnourished way. His shoulders are more like Dick’s, he’s nowhere near as bulked as Bruce is, but he likes them fine. He’s made up of calves and thighs and biceps. He can’t fit in between Dot’s Bakery and Juno’s Hair Salon anymore but he can still slip away from gangsters just fine. When he runs into the working girls as Robin, they still think he’s adorable, a heartbreaker in the making. He’s shorter than Dick but taller than Beast Boy. And, okay, yes, Beast Boy was younger than him. He’s light for his age, despite Alfred continuously feeding him. He doesn’t get the opportunity to grow much after that. He dies.

Jason doesn’t know what he looked like when he came back to life. Catatonia and all that messed up his abilities of self-perception pretty bad. Somewhere between digging himself out of his grave, the pit, and coming back to Gotham, he’s changed a lot.

When Jason is seventeen, he’s 6’0” and muscles and anger. He’s taller than Dick, almost as tall as Bruce. He’s built like a tank: made up of wide shoulders, a broad chest, and scarred knuckles.

He’s back in Gotham. He’s Red Hood. He makes a reputation for himself with the new identity, invoking fear in even some of Gotham’s worst criminals. 

Jason lies in wait in the rafters of a warehouse. There’s a creaking of the door and a man’s voice floats into the space. It doesn’t take long for the man to come into complete view, cellphone to his ear.

“I don’t give a damn how long it’s going to take you. Just _get it done_.” He snaps the phone shut.

Jason drops down, landing just feet in front of the man. “Lacky problems? Sometimes they just need _encouragement_ , a little gun pointing—” he draws his pistols. The man stumbles and falls backwards. “A little blood splatter—” he fires a round into the man’s leg, resulting in a loud scream. “And then they pull their act together,” Jason says over the noise. He walks over to the man while making a show of twirling his pistols. The man’s following his every move, wide-eyed, and desperately putting pressure on his wound. Jason holsters one pistol, presses the barrel of the other up at an angle at the carotid, and bends forwards. His shadow engulfs the man. “Think you can pull your act together for me, Stevie?”

Stevie trembles. He chokes on an aborted sentence and a small whimper. Moonlight catches sweat on his brow as he stares up at Jason. “Hood, please, I don’t understand. The Falcones—” He cuts off when Jason pushes the barrel farther into his throat.

“Nuh-uh. None of that shit. I don’t care that you’re one of Falcone’s. You’re going to play by my rules now.”

Stevie lets out a sob. “Sure. Whatever you say, man.”

Jason raises the pistol and taps Stevie’s cheek with it. “Glad to hear it.” He straightens back up.

Jason and Dick are in costume in the middle of a field of rubble. There are heroes grouped a small distance away from them but neither of them are paying any attention to the other capes.

Jason is trying to make Dick see reason because she’s being fucking ridiculous. Their voices gradually get louder, gestures larger. Jason is tired of Dick’s bullshit. He takes a step closer to her. Instead of looking up, Dick steps even closer, uncomfortably so, grabs Jason by the lapels of his leather jacket, and pulls him so they’re mask to mask. “ _Back up_ ,” she says with an angry, irritated cut in her voice that Jason hasn’t ever had directed at him. She lets go with a shove that has Jason moving backwards without thinking about it.

Jason is in crime alley, hood on, guns blazing. It’s blue hour. Between two rows of brown brick, Jason is littering asphalt with blood and bodies. He leaves them lying next to trash bags and Gotham rats. He walks over to dumpster at the far end of the alleyway. There’s a girl, maybe about twelve, shoving a younger boy behind her. “Mister Hood?” She keeps a good distance between them and visibly notes the bodies past Jason.

“Coast is clear.”

She gives him a nod of thanks and corrals the younger boy to start walking away. They get a few yards before the girl stops and turns back towards Jason. “Mister Hood, you should try to not be so scary.”

Deathstroke is 6’5” and made of killing intent. He and Jason exchange a series of blocks and blows surrounded by broken glass in the middle of a greenhouse. There’s grappling and proximity and force. Deathstroke crowds around him, bodies too close, and occasionally making a depreciating comment. The man gets him in a painful hold and Jason struggles his best against it.

Jason hates it. He hates that he can’t seem to get the upper hand. He hates how strong Deathstroke is, how he can catch a punch with little effort. Jason doesn’t panic, but he feels powerless.

Dick appears out of nowhere with a kick that lands on the side of Deathstroke’s head. Jason is let free as the two begin to engage. He takes a moment to breath, trusting Dick to take care of herself. When he focuses back on the fight, the air feels different. Each movement is lightening quick, their touches don’t linger, and there’s a distance maintained between them. Deathstroke’s degrading quips become critiques and Dick shoots back with innuendos and puns. Jason can’t pinpoint why, exactly, but the fight reads like respect.

Jason is in casual clothes walking down the street in the financial district. It’s late at night but the light pollution and the regular pollution has the sky illuminated in the usual Gotham-red haze. A shriek and a cry sounds from behind Cat Lounge. He sprints towards the noise. He finds a man with his hand over a woman’s mouth and a knee positioned so one of the woman’s legs was boxed between both of his. Jason has his fist against the man’s cheek in an instant. There’s an audible crack and the man falls to the ground. Jason turns to the woman. She flinches back. Hard.

He raises his hands, palms out. “You okay?”

She steps sideways, away from him, with her back still pressed into stone of the lounge. “Fine.”

He puts his hands down. “Can I walk you somewhere? Home? Bus stop?”

She takes a half-step further away. “No thank you. I’m going to go inside and call a friend.”

Jason gives her a small shrug. “Uh. Okay.”

She leaves with a glance over her shoulder like she’s making sure Jason isn’t following her.

It’s around three o’clock in the morning. It’s Jason’s eighteenth birthday. He’s sitting at the bar in a diner off a road in the middle of nowhere wearing a navy hoodie. There’s one girl across the counter from him cooking his order. She’s tense and she keeps glancing out the front window.

It doesn’t take her long to finish making his food. She places it in front of him with a strained smile. She cleans up a few things while he eats, but her nerves don’t get any less obvious.

She’s refilling his coffee when headlights flash through the window. She tops him off, puts the coffee up, and stares at the door. A moment later another girl in the same diner uniform walks in. The presence of a second person drops the first girls shoulders back into a relaxed posture.

She’d been scared because she was alone with him.

Jason glances at his reflection in the far window, at his full frame. For the first time, he realizes that _he_ is threatening. He thinks of that night with Lola and the man. He thinks of Bruce looming over Dick in the Batcave. He thinks of bodies being used to domineer and intimidate.

He hates it on principle. He hates people using their bodies to make others feel powerless.

He hates realizing that he’s done it.

He hates realizing that people are scared of _him_ not just Red Hood.

**Author's Note:**

> Three research papers and two presentations later, my semester is over! One more until graduation. I've somehow ignored applying to gradschool (I really need to do that). And I haven't written anything for other updates. But, I'm in quarantine so maybe I'll get to writing more. 
> 
> I'm hoping the takeaway from this can be being more conscious about how we're using our bodies.  
> This is not saying all women are afraid of men. This isn't saying men are all scary. This is saying people can use their bodies to make other people feel small, to make them feel powerless. And their body language might not even be a conscious decision.


End file.
